Free Operation: Midnight Guardian by Linda Castillo

stooping that low. Up until this point he’d been Mr. Professional Cop. But how had she ended up half-naked and in bed with him?
    “You took off my clothes,” she accused.
    “I removed wet clothing to keep you from losing body heat,” he said. “You were hypothermic.”
    “You had no right.”
    “If I hadn’t, you very likely would have died.”
    She motioned toward him. “Is that why you took off your clothes, too?”
    He reached for the dusty pillow and set it on his lap. “You weren’t the only one whose clothes were wet. We’d been in the snow for hours. We were both wet. We needed shelter and to get dry.”
    Mattie remembered trudging through impossibly deep snow. She remembered the terrible feeling of exhaustion and confusion and the utter certainty that she was going to die. Only then did it dawn on her that this man had saved her life. That in the scope of things, her vanity was the last thing she ought to be worried about.
    “Nothing happened,” he said.
    “How long was I out?”
    He glanced toward the window. “Judging from the light, I’d say we slept a couple of hours.”
    She looked into his eyes. “You saved my life.”
    “I did what I had to do.”
    “I’m sorry I assumed…” Not sure how to finish, she let the sentence dangle.
    “Hypothermia can cause confusion,” he said. “That’s how it works. You get tired. You get confused. You lie down and never get up.”
    She released the breath she’d been holding. “Thank you.”
    “I was just doing my job.”
    Unable to meet his gaze, she looked out the window. Through the grime, she could see that the snow was still coming down hard. “What do we do now?”
    “Rest. Find some food. Keep the fire going.” He parted the shirt and glanced down at his chest, shrugged. “Both of us are pretty banged up.”
    Mattie caught sight of the angry red and purple bruises covering the flesh just below his left pectoral, gasping at the severity of them. “My God. Is that where you were shot back at the rendezvous point?”
    He nodded. “My vest stopped the bullet, but it sure as hell didn’t keep it from cracking a rib or two.”
    Mattie knew how painful broken ribs could be. When she was a teenager a car accident left her with two cracked ribs. She’d been laid up for a week and missed her junior prom. She couldn’t imagine having broken ribs and trudging through a blizzard. She certainly couldn’t imagine how much it had hurt him to carry her.
    “Wouldn’t it have been easier if you’d left me behind to die?” she asked.
    “My job isn’t about easy most of the time.”
    Because she didn’t know how to respond to that, Mattie pulled the blanket more tightly around her and walked to the hearth. “Looks like we’re about to run out of wood,” she said, motioning toward the few remaining pieces of the table he’d been using.
    “There’s no way we’re going to find dry firewood outside. Once that wood is gone, we burn whatever we can find, including the walls of the mud room and cabinets.” Rising, he walked swiftly to where his jeans hung near the hearth and stepped into them.
    Mattie caught a glimpse of muscular male thighs. Lean hips encased in snug boxer shorts. The hint of a part of his anatomy she didn’t want to think about…
    “What about The Jaguar?” she asked.
    He shot her a sharp look. He always did that, she realized, whenever she mentioned the terrorist by that name. The Jaguar had reacted much the same way when his underling had mentioned Cutter’s name. She wondered if the men had some kind of history.
    Grimacing, he looked out the window. “It’s hard to imagine a pilot crazy enough to fly a chopper in this weather.”
    “If I recall, you’d just said something similar at about the time said chopper swooped down and those men started shooting at us.”
    “I’ve never been good at predicting when someone is going to do something completely insane.”
    An uneasy feeling stole over her. “That means they